Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of hierarchical node management. More specifically, the present invention is related to node storage, location, and grouping via physical and logical identifiers.
Discussion of Prior Art
A tree structure comprising nodes is a type of data structure in which each element is attached to one or more elements directly beneath it. The connections among elements in a tree structure are called branches. Trees are often called inverted trees because they are normally drawn with the root at the top. Inverted trees are the data structures used to represent hierarchical file structures. In this case, the leaves are files and the other elements above the leaves are directories.
Tree structures have been used in prior art data processing systems to organize data. But, a disadvantage with such prior art is that they fails to provide for a node identification system for ordered nodes wherein adding or deleting a child node (or a subtree of nodes) from a hierarchical structure of nodes still maintains the order and relationships between the parent, child, and sibling nodes. Node identification solutions based upon assigning preorder traversal and/or postorder traversal numbers can only provide an ordering solution as such solutions cannot be used to identify sibling relationships between nodes.
Yet another disadvantage of such prior art systems is that they fail to address storage architectures for hierarchical data providing the advantage of having physical links between the nodes (for fast traversal) and also providing the advantage of having logical links between nodes (for easier updating, versioning, and reorganization).
The following references provide a general teaching in ordering nodes, but they fail to provide for a solution that incorporates advantages of both the physical and logical storage architectures.
The patent application publication to Sutherland et al. (2002/0114341 A1) discloses a peer-to-peer storage system that includes a storage coordinator that centrally manages distributed storage resources in accordance with system policies. The storage resources are otherwise unused portions of storage media, e.g., hard disks, that are included in the devices such as personal computers, workstations, laptops, file servers, and so forth, that are connected to a corporate computer network. The devices are referred to collectively as “storage nodes.” The storage coordinator manages the distributed storage resources by assigning the nodes to various groups and allocating the storage resources on each of the nodes in a given group to maintaining dynamically replicated versions of the group files.
The patent application publication to Schnelle et al. (2003/0070144) discloses the conversion of an XML encoded dataset into a minimal set of SQL tables. In the disclosed method, a hierarchical structure in the XML encoded dataset is identified. A node element set for the XML encoded dataset is determined, wherein each node element in the node element set is a discrete level of the hierarchical structure of the dataset. One or more nodes of the XML encoded dataset are determined, each node being an instance of a node element. A unique node identifier is allocated to each node. Then, an SQL node table containing one or more records is generated, each record corresponding to a respective one of the allocated node identifiers. An SQL ancestry table is optionally generated to define the inter-relationships among nodes of the identified hierarchical structure of the XML encoded dataset.
The patent application publication to Moses (2003/0061216) discloses a system and method for controlling access to data within a hierarchically organized document, such as an XML document. Elements may have their access rights specified, for example as a variable in an XML tag. If not specified within an element of the document, access rights are inherited from its nearest ancestor. Specified access rights may refer to a collection of entitlement expressions, which describe with arbitrarily fine granularity which users and user types may access the data.
The non-patent literature to Ives et al., titled “An XML query engine for network-bound data,” generally discloses how XML documents are modeled using a tree structure.
The above-mentioned prior art fail to provide for a solution that incorporates advantages of both the physical and logical storage architectures. Whatever the precise merits, features, and advantages of the above cited references, none of them achieves or fulfills the purposes of the present invention.